


Is That You?

by MapleLantern



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-29 16:51:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19404289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MapleLantern/pseuds/MapleLantern
Summary: It’s ridiculous really, that in the moment he is grateful for the incoming Apocalypse. He would be grateful for anything that could take that crushing note of grief from Crowley’s voice, even the impending end of the world.





	Is That You?

**Author's Note:**

> Because I have never heard Tennant so sad and the music for this scene is unbelievable.

“I lost my best friend.”

For a moment, he feels a ripple of centuries. Memory can be a tricky thing, for an angel, over the course of millennia, even as it can be for a human over a course of decades. So much of the path fades away, only leaving occasional markers, so that the journey of memory becomes more like stepping stone to stone over a river as the water rushes beneath. For Aziraphale, he so often comes up against a snake, sunning itself on the next stone, that he can barely get anywhere else for looking. 

Aziraphale could tell you what he and Crowley discussed in Rome in 41, what they had eaten for lunch in Paris in 1793, just what atrocity Crowley had done to his own hair in 1834. He could tell you just how Crowley had smiled at him in Brazil, but could not tell you the year; he could tell you how they had spent an afternoon arguing about the renovations to Euston station, but could not tell you what they had been; and he could, although he never would, tell you the last time that he had heard such vulnerability in Crowley’s voice. 

If Aziraphale had had breathe at that moment it would have caught. And not being able to see Crowley is suddenly so much worse, as his voice wavers through the thick ethereal syrup of corporeal existence.

“So sorry to hear it,” He says, without thinking, but remembering how he had said it last somewhere over Mesopotamia, when he could do nothing but listen. “Listen, there’s a book I need you to get.”

“Oh,” Comes Crowley’s voice, “Your bookshop isn’t there anymore.”

“Oh?”

“I’m really sorry, it burned down.”

It wouldn’t take someone as intimate with Crowley as Aziraphale to know that this time, amongst the hurt, Crowley was also drunk, but even still the quiet despair in his voice is like an open wound throughout Aziraphale’s ethereal being.

“All of it?” He says, unable to reach out and touch his demon, cup his face or even wrap an arm around him. He reaches out a little with his aura, desperate to give some kind of comfort even as he is lost amongst the winds of the universe, but withdraws almost immediately when Crowley makes a small noise that might be discomfort. 

Aziraphale knows he hasn’t one, at least not like this, but his heart feels like it might break.  
“What was the book?” Crowley mutters, seemingly oblivious. 

“The one the young lady with the bicycle left behind,” Aziraphale says, automatically. “The Nice and Accurate Prophecies-”

Crowley’s shriek, at least, is a shriek, rather than a whimper, and Aziraphale latches onto it, feeling buoyed as Crowley’s voice tips upwards. It’s ridiculous really, that in the moment he is grateful for the incoming Apocalypse. He would be grateful for anything that could take that crushing note of grief rom Crowley’s voice, even the impending end of the world. In fact…

“But we’re both going to have to get a bit of a wiggle on!” He calls, even as the tenuous connection he has begins to fade. 

Aziraphale thinks he has never heard anything more beautiful, at that moment, than Crowley’s snort of second hand embarrassment.


End file.
